The Soulless

Chapter 9. Shadows

                Mark left my room the second the name slipped out of his lips, smug that he managed to make me shuttered. Did I imagine it, or he actually sounded a bit concerned at the question? Like he had stayed this long, just to wait for me and when I came home, to find a way and ask me without it sounding obvious and totally failing in the process? But if so, why did he leave so abruptly?

                I sat on my bed, feeling kind of intrigued and focused on the name itself, while I stared at the night shadows dancing on the floor along with the wind and the stormy clouds outside. Adan McGraw. It did sound familiar.  Like a distant memory I couldn’t quite catch, a glimpse of the past or the future, a damn déjà vu. Was I imagining it or I could really picture a young man walking through a crowd towards me, a military coat on his shoulders?

He took my hand in his and gallantly bowed. “Adan McGraw, milady.” He told me with a sophisticated tone. I couldn’t see his face, I never could these days, but I knew he looked me openly in the eyes, and I wasn’t able to tear my gaze either.

                The man smiled, assessment in his eyes, and I stared like a fool, feeling my legs barely holding me on the ground. I thought I had never seen such a splendid man before. I said to myself I could spent the whole night looking at these baby blues…

                The moment was gone in a second, leaving me with an empty heart and a new type of longing. Not for the moment of the separation, but about all the time from our first meeting on. I blinked and tried to focus on the details from the memory before they slipped my mind again. Alight. A military coat, dark grey with some bland shoots on the shoulders. I couldn’t recognize what army this uniform belonged to. It was not Civil war per say, or any recent war after that, but it wasn’t extremely old as well. Maybe it was a masked ball, or Halloween, who knew. No matter how hard I tried to see more of that memory it was just gone, as if someone was blocking me on purpose, this someone being my own mind, of course. Maybe I had to approach this from a different angle. I rolled my eyes to clear my mind, then dug back into the memory, and there it was – the soft light from the chandeliers above our heads, a large dancing hall with shiny floors and filled to the brim with people, who spoke, or danced. Chatter of glasses and smell of food and wine and the finest of perfumes filled the space along with the soft music. A gathering… a ball? A masked ball. Why else would everybody be dressed like that? God, was this my first date with Adan? Or the day we met for the first time? I couldn’t remember it as vividly as the moment we were torn apart, but it was a dear memory nonetheless.

                I felt myself shivering, my heart was beating like crazy in my chest, jumping like a ping-pong ball, while my hands clanged the covers on my bed in desperation. I was getting sweaty with the tension.

“Oh god!” I shouted and bolted out of the room.

                I went up to the attic, but Mark’s door was locked and even though I banged a few times, I could feel there was nobody inside. So, I went downstairs, rushing through the living room. I could barely register Abbie’s worried look and questions, but I couldn’t think about it right now. He wasn’t here! The fucker was gone and I couldn’t find him!

                “Where is Mark?” I snapped at Abbie, who stared at me with widely open eyes, confusion written all over her face.

                Abbie rose from the chair and came near me. “I think he went out, he didn’t say much though.”

                “s**t!” If he was out, I had no way of reaching him, not before the night was over and he was back home to crawl to his room and hide inside like a vampire.

                “Terry, please calm down. What happened?” Abbie put her hands on my shoulders. “What did he do?”

                “He knows Adan, Abbie!” I told her with a shining gaze.

                “What? Dear, are you sure he didn’t lie to you?” She could barely hide the embarrassment for him while she led me into the kitchen. “Please, sit down and calm a little.”

                I listened to her and crumbled into the first chair that came to my vision, leaning forward on the kitchen table. “Lie to me?” I repeated like some kind of a lunatic, and raised my eyes towards her, but I could barely see her at all through my clouded vision. “No, no… he doesn’t know that I don’t remember. H-he called him Adan McGraw. And I remembered that… that’s his real name, his full name, you know?”

                “Alright, still, just please don’t put your hopes on Mark. Whatever he told you, maybe he did it to disturb you, and look where you are. Unfortunately, my son is not someone you can count on.”

                Yes, I knew very well the type of person Mark was. Hearing it from his mother however didn’t sit quite well with me. Like… wasn’t she supposed to love and support him no matter what? Still, it was not my business to judge, I reminded myself. I knew very well the story of why Jonathan finally kicked him out. Carl had told me all about it after his brother’s grand return. There was a fight, and Mark had gotten again with the wrong company, and drugs and police were involved this time. They fought like crazy, the father and son, and it got so bad with Mark always pushing people’s buttons and Jonathan always judging him for not being the perfect son, as if there was some formula to be applied to achieve it. In the end, Jonathan lost his temper and slapped his son. It was not right, not in the slightest. But then Mark hit him back. And it was the last straw that made s**t hit the fan.

                So, yeah, I had a pretty good idea about the kind of person Mark Blackthorn was. But I could clearly remember the way he looked when he said Adan’s name. It was just a glimpse, a sudden shiver running through his body, and he composed himself the moment that followed but it was there – for some reason Mark Blackthorn feared Adan McGraw.

                Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell this to Abbie and convince her her son hadn’t been cruel to me on this matter at least. Because if I did, I would have to explain my own freakishness. At this point I believed it was not only me the one with weird abilities. At least I was somehow sure Adan was like me, which made him even more precious to my heart. Knowing that there were others like me at least partially lessened my loneliness and helped me breathe easily. Why on earth every waking thought of mine had to be filled with Adan, was another mystery on its own.

                I looked back at Abbie, trying to calm my expression for her sake, while she stood there for me and gently held my hands. You should be holding your son, not me, a traitorous voice squeaked in my head, but I tossed it away. This was the stupidest thing ever.

                “I am really sorry that Mark picks on you so much. I try to talk to him, but…” Abbie sighed, not able to hide the torment in her eyes, and I felt guilty as hell for judging her again. She was not a bad person, damn it. She was just a mother and a wife, torn between the fight of the two most important people in her life. And who was I with my barely four months of living experience to challenge that?

                “It is not your fault.” I said gently. He is just a big i***t with anger issues he doesn’t know how to solve.” I told her with a reassuring smile and a tone that sounded a lot like lessening all of Mark’s sins. Which was not something I aimed for besides for helping his mother feel reassured.

                “He’s always been like this, you know? Ever since he was little, he fought with the kids, always looked for justice where a child would never be able to find it. And later, when Jonathan tried to put him on the right path of life, everything got so much worse…”

                “Don’t worry about me, Abbie. Mark is who he is. I know I should take with caution everything he says. It’s just that this time I have no other choice but to trust him.”

                Maybe I was supposed to tell her that everything with her son would be alright, that one day he would come to realize his mistakes and will come seeking for forgiveness from everyone he had wronged and would forgive everyone who wronged him. But in reality he was a jackass with too much self-confidence, and he would probably never learned. I just hope he wouldn’t hurt his family even more in the process of not-learning and breaking everything he touched. Maybe it is true what old people say – that you could find one’s soul in their eyes, but in his I could see none, there was nothing there except nothingness and indifference. That man didn’t do anything without a purpose, he was too lazy for random s**t, and only god knew what he was actually looking for inside my room.